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Note: Birth date from 1900 Census Death date taken from Alice Foote MacDougall's 1928 book, Autobiography of a Business Woman., p. ?
Alice tells the story of her coffee career as one of necessity, as her husband descended into some mysterious malady which rendered him unable to provide for his family, and led to his early death, in 1907. Alice describes this all with wonderful Victorian circumspection. According to Caroline MacDougall, he was an alchoholic, and the cause of death was esophogeal cancer, which certainly fits. It is curious he is not buried in the Allen plot in Woodlawn, as the family certainly held it at the time; burial location presently unknown.
Allan Macdougall found in:
Census Microfilm Records: New York, 1900
Lived in: Manhattan Borough, New York County, New York
Series: T623 Microfilm: 1105 Book: 2 Page: 152 [a- 153]
The family is renting 361 (W) 101st St.
MacDougall, Allan, H, W, M, Feb 1854, 46, M (11 yrs.), NY, NY, SC, Coffee Broker, R
Alice, Wife, W, F, Mar 1867, 33, M (11 yrs.), 3 ch, 3 liv, NY, Mass, NY
Gladys Daughter, W, F, Mar 1891, 9, NY, NY, NY, At School
Allan, Son, W, M, June 1894, 5, NY, NY, NY, At School
Donald, Son, W, M, Feb 1897, 3, NY, NY, NY
Cooper, Mattie?, Servant, B, F, Sep 1870, 29, M (7 yrs) 0 ch, 0 liv, Va, Va, Va., Servant
Davis, Hattie, Servant, B, F, July 1873, 26, M (7 yrs) 2 ch, 0 liv, Va, Va, Va, Servant
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Continued from the notes for Alice Foote MacDougall...
Never will I forget, never cease to thrill, over the remembrance of the cutting of the Thanksgiving cake, in my grandfather Foote's home. Of course all who are New Englanders will remember the pomp and glory of Thanksgiving in those days. The bustle of preparation for days before gradually increased as the great day approached. Not only cakes and pies, but beautiful dresses and marvelous coiffures were prepared. The beautiful old house was cleaned and made to blaze with a kind of benevolent sentimentality as, one after another, members of the family forgathered to take part in the festivity. And the air was over-fragrant with delicious odors of turkeys, ducks, geese and all kinds of vegetables yielding up their virtues for the feast.
The day arrived. Shades of the departed, where did you get your digestions? Breakfast was a mere trifling meal of an hour or so: hot breads of endless variety, coffee exhilarating by its fragrance, and literally warming the cockles of one's heart, for houses were none too warm and November in New England is a fine month of cold, foretasting winter. There followed fried oysters, chops, corned-beef hash, and griddle cakes, served with loads of butter and cream too thick to be poured.
Then a little silence, and the stately walk to church. Here the festival took on a more solemn tone, and deep and reverent voices raised hymns of thanksgiving to God for His goodness throughout the year. Church over, our hearts were free for another kind of rejoicing. The meeting of friends, the interchange of compliments and experiences, the reawakening of affections dormant throughout a year.
At last approaches the great hour. Thanksgiving dinner is ready. In full evening dress, though it is but two o'clock only, my grandparents enter the beautiful blue parlor. The surrounding walls are rich with the paintings Grandpapa loved so well, and soft lights reveal the beauty of his wife and family as, one after another, the children and grandchildren of Homer and Delia Foote arrive to greet their parents on this Thanksgiving Day. Then Grandma seats herself at the piano, and her gouty fingers once more play the music by which for years her children have marched into the dining room for the great feast. Her children and their wives or husbands sit at the large table, while the grandchildren have a table to themselves. Wines of different kinds appear in due order as the long procession of foods marches by in stately dignity.
About five, a little weary, -- and, let us hope, not too ill from all the culinary glory, -- the family separates, the women not to appear till the evening reception, when Grandpapa entertained all the "sisters and the cousins and the aunts."
The men again meet at seven, and then comes the great moment, the cutting of the Thanksgiving cake. Port and sherry alone accompany this rare and delectable dish, and as the knife separates the cake into rich golden pieces, it is accompanied by the singing of my grandfather and his seven sons. All of them have rich, melodious voices-tenor, baritone, bass. They sing unaccompanied, only the simple melodies of the people, but with a beautiful feeling for melody and harmony: "Nellie was a lady," "Old Black Joe," "Way down upon the Swanee River." Perched on my father's knee I thrilled to the sentiment as well as to the beauty of the festival. In after years it is still a lovely memory. About nine, the family-the big family of all the relatives-began to arrive and more formal music entertained the guests.
It was truly a day of feasting, and I feel that the great joy of the music, the element of thankfulness that inspired us, the vast and generous hospitality that really was a thing of the heart rather than of the purse and prominence, all were a legacy of infinite value to me.
When my parents were not at the theatre, opera, or the home of some friend, our evenings were spent in the middle parlor, a room gleaming in a deep red setting, where we chatted and read before a wood fire. Here would gather a few choice friends, and a stately game of whist-the old whist, not the hybrid bridge or auction-would progress. I sat curled up on the sofa one evening, drawing, and a series of rather remarkable boats resulted. Queer gull things, never getting quite into the water, sometimes floating perilously near the moon, but to the discriminating judgment of my parents, always alert for the suggestion of any inclination on my part, here was indicated something to be cultivated. At once began hours of pure delight with a sweet, gentle soul, Miss Alicia Crocker, who gave me lessons in drawing and later in water color.
Busily engaged one day drawing the head of a horse, a certain shape of the cheek baffled me. I drew and erased, drew and erased, and finally, exasperated, seized a heavy black pencil. Before the startled and horrified eyes of my gentle teacher, I took it with both hands and, bearing with all my strength, mad a straight hard line wide and heavy enough to all but cut the paper. It was the child equivalent of saying D----, that most helpful of all words! What a rest to a tired and weary spirit that one explosive gives. God, the great psychologist, probably invented it to help his suffering children, and it was a stupid prophet who pronounced as a commandment, "Thou shalt not swear." Of course, I should have been punished. The more intelligent teachers of to-day would doubtless have seen embryonic tendencies of a quite fearful nature in this outburst. But the patient lady beside me, after a mild convulsion of shocked surprise, began the erasing process all over again. The memory is still vivid, for to my restless nature the sustained effort was more than taxing, and every time I look into the amiable face of that horse or speak to the dear patient lady who taught me, visions of that room, the drawing boards, and the half-finished sketch rise vividly before me. Nothing could have been more lasting. Did that long, slow erasing start the self- discipline of after years? I wonder.
In my mother's home, good housekeeping stood out predominant. You could tell the time of day by what the maid was doing. If Jenny was brushing the fourth step of the front stairs, you could lay your last dollar that it was ten-thirty A.M.; and as sure at it was Thursday night, so did we feast on chicken. Order and method carried to its nth degree-a little of a strain to irregular Papa and me, but excellent of the smooth running of the house. Mamma was a religious woman, but her real God was good housekeeping, and system was His handmaiden. Weddings, baptisms, receptions, and dinners were always "of a Thursda'," as Maria, the maid, would say, because the laundry was out of the kitchen. I used to wonder what on earth would happen if any one of us had the temerity to died the latter part of the week. What an upset to the aforesaid Maria if the funeral, instead of the washing, had to be done "of a Monda'." There were elements of humor in my mother's housekeeping.
Being a good mother, she desired a spherical education for her daughter, so at intervals, even in my early days, I spent long, delightful afternoons helping Jane, the cook. Possibly they were not altogether delightful for Jane, but to me my adventures into the realm of home-made pies, roasts and broils were sheer delight. I having heard Jane say she must "draw" the turkey, band being filled with an honest zeal to assist, Jane's feelings may better be imagined than described when she saw the aforementioned turkey on a long string, being "drawn" over the cold stones of the back yard by literal me.
I smile at times, to-day, as "pasteurized," "modified," and "acidophilous" milk wagons pass me by. The method was far more simple when I was a little girl. Jane, before going to bed, left outside the kitchen door, on the sidewalk, a nice old milk pail, and the next morning Borden's man dipped the day's milk, rich in germs if nothing else, out of an open can into the pail, thereby subjecting infant me to every contagious disease the world has ever known. It's a good germ that knows its business apparently, for here I am, sixty years old, having never had any infantile diseases except measles and whooping cough.
Only once were my ears boxed, and that was when the excitement of getting ready for my first opera-Mignon, with lovely Christine Nilsson-got the better of me and induced an impertinent answer to a command of my mother's. I remember much hurrying and scurrying to and fro, a sharp command, and impertinent answer from small me, a swift cuff on the ear, and the irate voice of Mamma saying, "There is one thing I won't stand from my children-impertinence." Those were the days when children were taught: "Honor they father and thy mother."
For punishment, during my father's absence in Europe, I was forced to sit-a little hard sometimes, according to the degree of my mother's irritation-on a chair; opposite, on another, was placed my father's photograph; and I can hear the awful tones of my mother's voice say, "Look at your dear father's face. See how sad he is because of your naughtiness." For a dreary half-hour there I would sit. First, as I watched Papa's face it grew sadder and sadder to my infant imagination; gradually tears would fill his eyes and rain in torrents down his cheeks, and then the black iniquity of Jonathan Edward's original sin was actually mild compared with the wickedness I found lodged in my small breast. Reduced to weeping and bitter lamentation, I was finally released amid wild protestations to be a good little girl and never be naughty again. The same picture looks from the wall of my bedroom at me to-day, but now it seems to smile with a tolerant patience at my more mature iniquity.
Religion? Ah, yes, a very real and practical religion, Unitarianism. What do I not owe to it? That faith which, divesting the soul of all its finery, exposes it bare to the critical investigation of the brain. It teaches courage to face life, not for fear of future punishment or hope of ultimate reward, but believing and teaching that God, Who has dealt with us so wisely and tenderly here, can be trusted utterly and entirely in the world to come.
II
READJUSTMENT
I AM always glad to think that my education was, for the most part, informal, and had not the slightest reference to a future business career. It left me free and untrammeled to approach my business problems without the limiting influence of specific training. For my temperament, this was best.
How simple my childhood was, how untheoretical my upbringing, it amuses me now to reflect, when I see present-day parents trying to teach children how to be happy, how to learn. I was happy. I learned quickly. I was let alone. Governessess I had, of course, and schooling, but my little-girl-hood was a great simplicity compared with the carefully worked-out schedules of modern children. The very fact that I was left free to find my own tastes, suggests the tempo of the life of that time. People had leisure. Life was not interpreted in a great deal of motion, a confusing "busy-ness." It makes me glad I am sixty instead of twenty, for I cherish the freedom from surveillance which was mine as a child. But the thought of it must give a modern educator gooseflesh.
My grandfather Allen had an extensive library where I was turned loose. No one told me that this or that book was "good" for me. Wide and free was my selection. I was in England shortly after the Wonderland Alice issued from the pen of Lewis Carroll. Edward Lear's Book of Nonsense also became part of my possessions. Daily I walked with the Red Queen. Sometimes I swam, like that other Alice, in my own pool of tears, for I was emotional even in those early days. And glad I am, too. Rather a hundred worries than the life of a clam at high water.
From Smollet to Louisa Alcott, from Shakespeare to Shelley, on through the wide fields of literature I ranged, until finally Browning, Emerson, George Eliot, and Spencer gave me a philosophy of life. I can imagine living without food. I cannot imagine living without books.
I realize that the child of to-day is cared for most meticulously according, let us say, to Hoyle-not one little bit according to Heart. I wonder if this is really such an advance over yesterday. My first ten years were singularly happy and care-free. I learned much, but not in the way of books, except that a French governess taught me so well the beautiful language of France that to-day I spell better in French than in English. And an old Irish cook was perhaps my most consistent teacher during this first decade. But there came a time when governesses, French and English, Jane the cook, and John the coachman, were not equal to the further training of Miss Alice, and so to school I was sent. New York was a small intimate place at that time, and there were only three good private schools. Anna C. Brackett's School for Girls was my parent's choice Its very title is indicative of its policy. Miss Austen had influenced people to speak of girls as "young ladies." Miss Brackett's brusqueness dubbed us by the less elegant title. Those of us who were taught by this marvelous woman still think of ourselves to-day as "Brackett's girls."
We lived on Eleventh Street, and Miss Brackett's was on Thirty-ninth. My walk thither was a triumphal progress. I started at Fifth Avenue and Eleventh, and by the time Twenty-third Street was reached my bodyguard frequently numbered six or eight young boys, intent on relieving me of the burden of my books, bestowing upon me, in the ardor of their youthful affection, sweet nosegays of lovely flowers. Of course I did not know consciously then what fun it was-the jokes, the laughter, the careless merriment of youth, the lovely crispness of the winter's morning, or the spring days making the young men's fancies more poignantly loving than was quite good for any of us. So attractive were these morning walks, indeed, that even on the stormiest days, when slush and snow made rubbers quite useless and no umbrella would withstand the tempestuous wind, I would steal away and walk that long distance instead of riding in the slow-moving, ill-smelling horse car. In those days the floors of cars and omnibuses were covered with the same kind of straw my father used for bedding his horses. Starting off clean, it soon became a sodden mass of mud and filth. Not an agreeable condition to ride in for half or three quarters of an hour. To this I preferred soaking shoes and stockings, and since my dresses reached to my ankles, these too became sodden with muddy water. I did not catch cold or have pneumonia, and when in later years poverty prevented my using the ordinary safeguards against exposure, the experiences of my schoolgirl days stood me in good stead and prevented my yielding to the traditional ideas wrapped around the prescriptions for good health.
To Anna C. Brackett education meant equipment, as well as knowledge and culture. Equipment to face life on its own terms, and give battle, without fear or favor, to its joys as well as sorrows. For to many of us ease is far more soul-destroying than trouble.
In after years I said to her, "How did you do it?" and she said, "Well, you see I had a plan." That was it-a plan, not an experiment. An appreciation of the many and varied calls of life, and a plan to make girls-not young ladies-fit to grapple with vicissitudes and capable of enjoying beauty.
There was no namby-pamby coddling of our embryo individualities, no palliating of error, no compromise with truth. Our responsibility was fixed. We had no marks, no examinations, but unconsciously we were judged by a jury of our peers, our classmates, and swift, sure, and unerring was their verdict. We had to do our lessons well, or feel their contempt. A far truer standard and more illuminating and practical than bringing home A in arithmetic to dear Mamma. And, by the way, arithmetic was torture to me. All those vile wall papers and carpets that never did fit, and the still more terrible "If John had 12 5/8 apples, and he have Susie 7 2/8, how many would he have left?" Thank heaven, I don't have to do those hateful miscellaneous exercises to-day. In spite of all life's discipline, I simply could not stand them.
But I did learn my arithmetic tables, upside down, forward, and backward, until I knew them in my sleep and sang them in my waking hours. You see, life is an arithmetic table, and the sooner we learn that fact the better fitted we are for the difficult adjustments it requires of us. If we learn what two-times-two means at five, our extravagance is not so apt to drive our husbands to suicide at forty-five. That is what it means to be educated. To hold our emotions and desires down to the simple fact of two-times-two. Later we may realize, with Emerson, that two-times-two equals five, but that, of course, is another and sweeter story.
My Latin exercises, after they were corrected with the terrible blue and red pencils of stern Miss Brackett, looked more like Turner's Slave Ship than the modest effort of a schoolgirl. In a course in Greek history Lilian Taylor, Bayard Taylor's daughter, established in our growing souls and abiding love for the Greek and the Great. One hated to be small and petty who walked intimately with Epaminondas, nor could one ever sink in the maelstrom of a dark despair whose soul had thrilled to a Madonna of Raphael or a poem of Shelley. That was education at Miss Brackett's.
Along with school came the daily drill of my patient mother in training me into ways methodical, orderly, careful, and thrifty. Domestic Science was unknown then, except as every woman automatically practised it. Not to be a good housekeeper and seamstress was something of a disgrace in the eyes of my mother's contemporaries. "A place for everything and everything in its place" was one of the most useful lessons ever taught me. To-day my daughter says, "No one on earth, Mother, is as orderly as you are. I just wish you could see other girls' bureau drawers." I dare say; but I know the old saying of a place for everything saved me innumerable hours of "I can't imagine where I put my gloves." Not only is orderliness an economy; it produces rest.
The age of ten was a turning point toward the life of the world. Many things happened to me then. Not only school was added to my experiences, but piano lessons as well. They were almost my undoing, and certainly contributed to a later neurasthenia. I was taught by a friend of my father's, M. Rivarde, a famous musician under whom my father himself had studied. M. Rivarde was an irascible, temperamental Frenchman whose rages never troubled my father one little bit, while to me they were torture. From the all-pervading love of parents and servants, I suddenly encountered, alone and unprotected, the rage of a Latin who knew no self-control, who assumed as a premise that all children were liars, and who had not the faintest feeling of patience, understanding, or sympathy.
Petrified with fear, I went twice weekly to the den of this roaring lion. As his temper began to mount, false notes fell from my fear-frozen fingers like drops of rain in a summer shower. Added to his bellowings were the sharp taps of his ruler-No, no on me; it might have been easier-on the case of the piano, on the marble mantelpiece, on anything hard, metallic, noisy. And all the time the vile regular beat of the metronome, tick-tick, tick-tick. After a lesson I would cry the night through.
Day after day I struggled with those dreadful exercises. Even though doctors warned of the danger to my whole nervous system at that critical age, Papa was deaf. M. Rivarde was his friend, and therefore not anyone in the world could so well teach the piano to his daughter. So the dreary years went on: exercises, scales-scales, exercises. Never a melody to break the monotony for eight years. Imagine my feelings after that time to hear M. Rivarde say, "And bom-by, when we are finished, we will begin all over again."
And yet I could not quite blame Papa, for so much pleasure had been his that he could hardly appreciate anything else connected with his singing maestro. At that time M. Rivarde was quite the rage. Clara Louise Kellogg and Annie Louise Cary were his pupils, singing nightly at the Academy of Music, together with Campanini, del Puente and Christine Nilsson.
When my fingers had gained sufficient facility, I played my own accompaniments and soon was singing with Papa much of the music of the Italian operas. Then M. Rivarde did scold! What did he mean, the bete Monsieur Foote, to let a little girl sing all that high, florid music? Did he want to ruin her voice? But this time Papa disobeyed M. Rivarde quite as casually as he had previously ignored the advice of our physician. So, though I wept at playing, singing dried my tears. Now, in retrospect, the agony of the piano still remains acute and poignant. But as we grow older we learn to "see life steadily and see it whole," and always music has been the solace of my saddest hours.
Then, also when I was ten years old, my brother Emerson was born, and Mamma had to forgo some of the pleasure of her intimate association with my father. To fill this gap, and believing in the great educational value of the play, Papa took me every Saturday night to the theatre. Then indeed was my life enriched.
One's first impressions are so vivid and one's eyes so uncritical, one's enjoyment so intense, that I am perhaps prejudiced, but nothing of to-day seems quite so satisfying, quite so worth while as the comedies played by the stock companies at Daly's and Wallack's. Pays interpreting clearly and without embroidery the low meanness as well as the lofty peaks to which human nature may attain, or plays that merely gave one a few hours of laughing delight. The School for Scandal, School, Caste, Shakespeare in infinite variety, all came to my eager call, answered my insatiable demand for understanding. There were great actors in those days: Booth and Barrett, Salvini, John McCullough, Adelaide Neilson, Modjeska, Mary Anderson, while, as I say, the regular stock companies at Wallack's, Daly's, and the Union Square, gave the best of modern and classical comedies.
Papa would not go to see Sarah Bernhardt because of her immorality. How standards vary with time! Driving up Fifth Avenue one afternoon, Papa took infinite pains to explain to me the difference between bad and good women-the one roughed and powdered. This was the outward visible sign of the black iniquity of her heart and soul, a kind of scarlet letter on lips and cheeks.
When I was very young, girls and boys were kept in ignorance of the sin of the world, and a kind of veil of watchful guardian love was drawn around their growing souls. People did not deem it necessary to parade vice for their benefit. Quite tenderly and very tactfully, Mamma revealed certain secrets to me "when it was time," but she wisely left me greatly to a life of abstract faith in beauty and purity, knowing full well that life itself would soon enough reveal the other side to me. It is not so with our girls and boys to-day. In our desire to clarify the meaning of life for them, we look through a glass darkly.
Those years loitered by filled with many delights. Then came the sinister suspicion of the disaster to my father's fortune. A disaster as terrible to me almost as to him, for my father was my first and perhaps my only great love. Certainly the most enduring. His beauty, he bonhomie, his charming personality, his goodness, fascinated me and drew me to him in a bond so strong, so profound, that to be with him was the greatest joy.
A second son was born to my parents when I was fourteen, Harry-my first child, I sometimes think, for my mother love found in him its first expression. Well worthy was he of all love, all devotion. He inherited many of my father's most lovable qualities and much of his charm. Without any training-apparently my struggle with the piano was sufficient "practice" for all three of us-he played the piano and the guitar most beautifully, while Emerson, my other brother, played the piano and the banjo. We were quite a noisy family, what with our voices and our various instruments.
But while the boys were little, Mamma became more and more engrossed in her household duties, her sewing, and her reading, and I entered ever more deeply into the intimacies of my father's life. He had a genius for finance, and had quickly risen to eminence among the business men of New York in the early seventies. Thus he earned a large fortune, and, being too sure of himself to foresee a possible disaster, was left penniless when it came.
Terrible days of effort followed. The wolf came near our highly respectable door, and Papa went from one mad venture to another in the get-rich-quick hope, only to be baffled, beaten at every turn. And I, his constant companion, shared this misfortune in the blind, uncomprehending way of a young girl, suffering the tortures of a profound sorrow over the incomprehensible trouble of my darling father. Night after night I lay awake, weeping and worrying, unable to fully understand, magnifying the danger, powerless to help, impotent to avert the approaching catastrophe.
My mother grew cold and unsympathetic, Papa's sunny laughter-loving nature changed to quick, unreasoning irritability, and I, his constant companion, bore the brunt of his carping criticism. Proud of me as the apple of his eye, his very pride caused my misery, for, in a perfectly irrational way, he heaped upon me every form of devotion and ruined all by the irascible outpourings of his overwrought nerves. I was on a veritable rack. His upbraiding and criticism tore my soul, while my heart broke at the thought of what his reverses meant to him.
Our home became an empty shell. There was the semblance of comfort, there was the music, there were the books, but the soul had gone. Cold contempt had taken the place of love in my mother's and brother's hearts. The radiant sunshine of my father's nature had changed to harassed anxiety. My first great sorrow inundated my soul, and I wandered bewildered and forlorn.
Once again, as in my infancy, my Quaker grandmother enfolded me within her sheltering love, and what peace I had at that time came when I went to her. She died just before the birth of my first child, but never has she seemed far away. Such love is true immortality.
Fortunately, there has always been a kind of India-rubber quality to my nature, and no matter how hard sorrow pressed me down, back I would spring to laugh, sing, and dance. The world always supplies companions for our gayety at least, so dances and dinners, parties and partners, arrived at regular intervals to lift the dreary gloom of my father's home.
Perhaps is were wiser not to dwell on the too many boys who embroidered my life at this time. Bobby and Walter, Jack and Paul-I wonder if to anyone else they ever appeared quite so beautiful or so noble, so clever or so fascinating as they did to me. They came and went until finally, when I was twenty years of age, Allan MacDougall, the man, my husband, entered.
Fourteen years older than I, ripe in the knowledge of the man of the world, he it was whom God chose to take me far from the circle of love and tenderness, of care and protection, and lead me slowly, painfully, though the dark mazes of dreadful disillusionment, until at the age of forty my life sentence was pronounced.
...Continued in the marriage notes for Alice and Allan.
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